Endpoints News Early Edition

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I am not shocked by Mylan’s actions here, and it is arguably not even the worst offender in the game of jacking up prices on old drugs. In my view, some drugs – particularly some new drugs – deserve to be expensive. (I’m on record here talking about Sovaldi, and I’ve even argued that for some drugs, we should be paying more as a quasi-prize to encourage investment.) The EpiPen and others should not be.

I don’t think pharmaceutical companies are evil. I think they are what we have made them. We’ve created a legal system in which companies like Mylan, Valeant, and Turing Pharmaceuticals can reap revenues which are outsized compared to their investments, their value to patients, or any other reasonable metric that is commonly considered. [...] Would preventing price increases over time just lead to higher initial prices? What would the effect on future innovation be from a law that imposed some sort of price control, either directly or by creating formulary pressure in different ways? I understand the considerations involved here. But the outrage over actions like Mylan’s must come with a prescription for change. If not, it is a matter of when, not if, this will happen again.